Evolution

I believe that most of the population of AP Bio is relieved to have exited the world of molecular biology. We now move along to bigger and better things, literally. The second half of the semester will be spent dealing with all living things bigger than a cell. Evolution is a topic that I always enjoy jumping into. Students always have a wide variety of thoughts and opinions on the matter and useful discussion generally results. Regardless of their various world views, the students of AP Biology have taken the subject matter in stride. This week in review (2/20-24) brought to you by Hannah Olaniyan and Alysha Higgs provides some insight into the inner workings of the AP Bio mind.

Hannah Begins:

This week in biology has been far more interesting than most of the other weeks I’ve encountered and I think the majority of my classmates would agree. The material has also been a lot easier to swallow and understand, whether or not we agree with it, than most of the material we learned all year. At least for me. We started off the week doing a virtual lab on electrophoresis----a process used to match DNA based on size and location. The lab showed us the process of creating the gel and the tub and we even got “match” well guess the location of our simulated DNA afterwards. We took brief notes on the history of evolution and after the lab; we all got to research interesting information on Charles Darwin and share it with the class afterwards, and it was interesting to see all the random facts we learned about Darwin that’s not taught in school. On Tuesday, we learned about the theory of evolution and more ideas that Darwin brought to the world of science. On Wednesday we took more notes on evolution and had a “not too” heated discussion about how we feel about “the theory of evolution” and why we agree or disagree with it and why. It was one of those exercises that forced you to listen to others opinions and thoughts and rationally agree or disagree. On Thursday, we learned about the Hardy-Weinberg Principle---a treat for our math lovers, the scenarios necessary in order for us to apply them, and we got into our comprehension groups and worked on some math problems. On the end of our week, we did a lab that put everything we learned into motion. We took brief notes at the beginning of class, and watched a cute video on elaborate birds and their methods to gain a mate. When doing the lab, we all started out with heterozygous alleles and “mated” with our classes and we would gather the data to see how many of us ended up with different alleles. We did that with different things working against us for example, we could have no homozygous recessive children and if we had homozygous dominant children, we would have to flip a coin which decided whether or not our child would survive. A fun activity to end our week! That has been our week in AP Bio.

Alysha Concludes:

Last week we were introduced to the unit on evolution. We began with the unit by talking about Darwinand his theories. I personally do not agree with the theory of evolution. I liked the debates that we gotinto in class about evolution and our views on evolution. I also found the lab that we did veryinteresting. It gave us a chance to really see what mating can do to a population and the influence thatmating has on the population. Truthfully, I cannot wait for this unit to be over.